“I am sure that we will win the lawsuit,” Abdullah Neroy, another of the original evacuees from the border village of Dutaza said. “The Turkish government has been paying compensation annually to the villagers that were evacuated from their side of the order. We just need to follow up on this and we’ll win the case.”
Human rights organizations estimate that during the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish government, as many as a million Kurdish villagers have been forced from their homes and as many 4,000 villages in the mountainous areas evacuated.
The PKK has been fighting for greater rights for the Kurds of Turkey and Kurdish autonomy since the early 1980s. The group is designated a terrorist organization by some countries and the violent conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives over the years. The PKK tend to be based in the inaccessible Qandil mountains on the Iraqi Kurdish side of the border and launch their attacks into Turkey from there. And this is the area from which most of the villagers have been evacuated.
“Over the past few years, the fields and the forests in these areas have been targeted by the military,” Sardar Kaka Hama, mayor of the district in which the villages were, said. “The bombing resulted in forest fires and the destruction of agricultural land. These people should be compensated,” he argued.
(Source: Niqash)
(Photo Credit: Kurdistan Adventures)
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